If
you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like
to eat,
or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail,
ask me
what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want
to live for.

The
beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly
themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.
If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their
potential
likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the
reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Do not depend on the hope of
results. You may have to face
the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even
achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what
you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and
more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the
rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle
less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship
that saves everything.

The more you try to avoid
suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things
begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who
does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

When we are alone on a
starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating
birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest
and eat; when we
see children in a moment when they are really children, when
we know
love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet,
Basho, we hear
an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at
such times the
awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the
"newness," the
emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves
evident,
all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

To say that I am made in the image of God is to
say that love is the reason
for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity.
Selflessness is
my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.

Reason
is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can
say no more.

Our
job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not
they
are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's
business.
What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will
render
both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the
murderous din of our materialism.

The greatest need of our
time is to clean out the enormous mass
of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds

Thomas
Merton was born in Prades, France, to artists Ruth and Owen Merton.
His early years were spent in the south of France; later, he went to
private school in England and then to Cambridge. Both of his parents
were deceased by the time Merton was a young teen and he eventually
moved to his grandparents' home in the United States to finish his
education at Columbia University in New York City. While a student
there, he completed a thesis on William Blake who was to remain a
lifelong influence on Merton's thought and writings.

But Merton's
active social and political conscience was also informed by his
conversion to Christianity and Catholicism in his early twenties. He
worked for a time at Friendship House under the mentorship of
Catherine Doherty and then began to sense a vocation in the
priesthood. In December 1941, he resigned his teaching post at
Bonaventure College, Olean, NY, and journeyed to the Abbey of
Gethsemani, near Louisville, Kentucky. There, Merton undertook the
life of a scholar and man of letters, in addition to his formation
as a Cistercian monk.
The thoroughly secular man was about to undertake a lifelong
spiritual journey into monasticism and the pursuit of his own
spirituality. The more than 50 books, 2000 poems, and numerous
essays, reviews, and lectures that have been recorded and published,
now form the canon of Merton's writings. His importance as a writer
in the American literary tradition is becoming clear. His influence
as a religious thinker and social critic is taking its place
alongside such luminaries as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Flannery O'Connor,
and Martin Luther King. His explorations of the religions of the
east initiated Merton's entrance into inter-religious dialogue that
puts him in the pioneering forefront of worldwide ecumenical
movements. Merton died suddenly, electrocuted by a malfunctioning
fan, while he was attending his first international monastic
conference near Bangkok, Thailand, in 1968.

From The Thomas Merton Society of Canada's web page, merton.ca/biography.html

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